Before Tarrya could do so much as draw breath to start barking orders, the knights of the order charged willy nilly into the ambush, spilling blood with an eagerness uncharacteristic of a supposedly charitable order. She smirked,  so much for all that righteousness and airs of nobility. The knights seemed to relish the slaughter as much as some of the bloodier mercenaries she had had the displeasure of working with.

It occurred to her that the trap might well be a part of a larger trap intending to draw them in with a small ambush and close the jaws around the bulk of the force and attack them from all sides. She’d seen it happen many times before, even sprung a trap just like that once or twice herself - amusingly enough also on a force consisting largely of nobles and their retinues. 

She turned around, content to let the knights enjoy themselves as she gave a series of short, sharp blasts on a whistle - four groups of four, to be precise. At the sound a group of the archers and men-at-arms trailing behind the knights broke off, jogging towards her as she waved them over. Not long after being assigned to Garrett’s retinue she had gone through the ranks of the the other soldiers, figuring out which ones would be willing to take orders from her regardless of the wealth of her parents and training them to act as a cohesive, disciplined individual unit, conditioning them to recognize certain patterns of whistle blasts and hand signals to take certain maneuvers. The four groups of three specifically were a signal to break up into small groups of four - two men-at-arms and two archers, to act as individual entities. 

Another signal from the whistle, this time a long, shrill blast followed by a series of hand signals and three short staccato peeps saw her and the selected soldiers blend into the woods to the flank. She gave another blast of the whistle, signaling to two of the teams to split up further and scout ahead as the main body followed close behind. The knights were too busy bathing in the blood of their foes to have noticed one of the bandits [i]had[/i] gotten away. A young boy clearly too frightened to join the general attack. By the time she’d seen him it’d been too late, and so she marched her group off into the forest. The knights could keep blundering on ahead, preaching about “valor” and “honor”, as if such things existed in war.

She would be setting up an ambush of her own for the bandits to stumble into. And, unlike some disorganized feudal levies, the troops she had trained were almost all veterans and instilled with an iron discipline. Garrett had been with her during several of the training sessions, and she had explained the signaling system to him in exhaustive detail - hopefully he would remember and tell the others of her plans so they didn’t stumble into her force and ruin the surprise. She marched on, looking at the troops fondly. They would not be prone to rookie mistakes that would open them to an attack by the so called bandit king. Nor would they flee at the sight of blood spilled, be it their enemies’ or friends’.